Recent Developments in Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation: A Review of the Selected Papers from ISHTEC2012

Abstract

It is our pleasure to present this special issue of Heat Transfer Engineering with a selection of papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation, ISHTEC2012, held January 6–9, 2012, in Guangzhou, China. The conference was sponsored by the Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of Education of Ministry of China. More than 160 delegates including 42 foreign delegates from 16 countries came to the conference and there were more than 140 papers presented at the conference. The topics covered a wide variety of fields from new heat transfer theories, to micro heat transfer, to enhanced heat transfer technologies and the heat transfer problems in energy use systems. This special issue is a selection of the best 21 papers presented at the conference, including 2 review papers and 19 full-length research papers. The analysis of these papers showed that there are new trends in recent years in heat transfer and energy conservation: (1) New heat transfer theories are actively proposed to optimize heat transfer problems. (2) New alternative energy use technologies are being extensively investigated to meet the desire for a low carbon society. (3) Even for the seemingly traditional processes and equipment, new phenomena and findings are continuously disclosed, during which computational fluid dynamics has been more and more relied on.